Tenth Anniversary

 

An old friend and colleague from the past spotted this astounding fact as he browsed through old blogs (don’t know why, bit like raking through the dust in someone else’s attic I suppose: an attic that is open to all). Yes, it really is ten years to the day that I launched my bookshop, robsbookshop.com, onto an unsuspecting, puzzled and mostly unaware public.You can see the original announcement here. This blog was initiated just a little earlier than that.

I cannot pretend that it has been a roaring success, though I did enjoy building the Literary Pub with all of its silly bars and I still find them funny. Last night I went out to the real pubs of Stow on the Wold and found them unreal during this covid-19 pandemic: we were refused entrance three times owing to lack of free tables; we were granted entry to two and sat there isolated as a vizored waiter failed to communicate with me; the range of ales available was pretty much unity and the atmosphere was lunar. So, in sympathy, I have taken a dump of robsbookshop.com with a view to removing the Literary Pub entirely – soon there will be no virtual pub unless a computer virus reinstates it, which is unlikely. Besides, the links were wearing out and maybe the humour as well.

I guess my most successful book is still Spread Spectrum: Hedy Lammar and the mobile phone though I am not sure how much robsbookshop.com contributed to that success, if at all. My fiction has not done well, though my own favourite novel, Shaken by China, did have an early spike. At first I actually sold and delivered paper books through the site, but that proved impractical and it is now mostly a repository for all of my titles which then passes sales on to, mostly, Amazon.

I think I’ve added six books to my list since the launch and there are three more ‘in the pipeline’. During that time I have put up nearly 200 blogs, roughly 20 per year with a peak of 26 in 2014. Why do I do it? Perhaps the answer lies in a quote from the novel I am currently reading (The Gustav Sonata) where Lottie asks Gustav ‘Why do you have to do anything. Couldn’t you just be?’ Maybe.

Fun Foods

 

My granddaughter eats chickens’ feet! Doesn’t that demonstrate just how diverse we have become as a family? Not really.

I have never eaten a chicken’s foot. I cannot readily think of a more revolting snack even if I try: rats’ ears perhaps or boiled toenails of an aged person maybe. But chickens’ feet disgust me. They are horny and clawed and have spent most of their lives scratching around in offal, or worse. There cannot be much meat on them so people who do eat them present a nibbling, ratty like appearance as they consume. The whole thing is quite revolting, but it is very popular.

And yet, people eat a lot of chickens, According to the Vegetarian Calculator the average person in the USA consumes 2,400 chickens during their lives. That’s 4,800 feet which, if not consumed, are wasted. Surely that’s not good for the planet!

When I kept pigs I read a lot about them. One of the anecdotal stories suggested that a farmer’s wife could use every bit of a pig bar its grunt. It was a silly statement because dead pigs do not grunt, but you take the point. My daughter had a taste for pigs’ trotters, though I always suspected she ate them for effect rather than satisfaction and I can at least excuse this indulgence since there is considerably more meat on a pig’s trotter than a chicken’s foot.

Many people in the world eat insects and in China we saw a great variety of exoskeletal treats proffered at market stalls. I did not try them because I do not like them, even though I have not tried them. In Cambodia I watched a young lady vending grubs. I did not see anyone buying them, but she liked them. Every minute or so her hand strayed towards her display, plucked a nice fat grub and popped it into her month and then munched contentedly. The grubs were rather fat, like overfed maggots – and so was she.

There’s more on the insectivores. This blog has led to the discovery that my daughter-in-law is partial to the odd insect. With certain conditions she has allowed me to include a photograph of her munching a scorpion. At first I thought the creature was floating towards her willing mouth, but if you look closely you will see that the creature is on a stick – like a lollipop or scorpionpop. 

When I was a boy we used to go levering. Elvers, I’m sure you know, are baby eels. To catch them we had first to dig up lots of worms. Then we, rather cruelly, sowed the worms onto threads, tied then all together in clumps and finally to a weight: this we attached to a stout rod with a strong cord. We then went forth to the Pill, a tributary of the River Severn, at the correct season of the year and dangled our worm clumps into the freshwater inlets that attracted the baby eels. They would hook their mouths onto the worms and we would lift them out and wipe them off into a bucket, time and time again. Might it have been simpler and equally nutritious, I now wonder, to eat the worms?

Back home my Mum would fry the elvers for breakfast and they were rather nice. Oddly, whilst writing this piece I picked up a BBC article with the headline: “Illegal elvers worth more than caviar on black market”. We could have been rich! And in a way we were, we also ate adult eels and flatfish that we caught and moorhens eggs that we stole from their nests, always leaving two behind. My mother always claimed that I and two other boys had eaten a dead seagull during one summer holiday. I have no recollection of that, but we were all three seriously ill later that year, missing almost a year’s schooling.

It is said that you are what you eat and I feel happier being part elver than I could ever feel about being part chicken foot. But what else can be done with the feet of so many chickens that are killed to provide Sunday roasts and chicken cutlets. I have a solution. When we had a small holding I killed our chickens as humanely as I could, then plucked them and removed their feet exposing the ligaments that had given the chicken control of its leg movements. I then chased our children around the farm whilst pulling on a ligament so that the foot seemed to be grabbing them. It was something to do. The chicken did not mind. It had passed into chicken heaven where its legs were extra long and fat edible grubs grew plentifully on trees.

(P.S. My son claims that he and I once did eat a chicken’s foot in Taiwan for a dare. I have no recollection of that and may have been drinking that country’s chicken soup laced with very strong rice wine at the time.)

 

 

 

The Sky

 

This is the view from my ‘library’ in Stow on the Wold, the room in which I often write when I wish to unplug (no Wi-Fi there). The panorama is dominated by the sky and looks NNW. The hills that you might just be able to see in the distance delineate the horizon: these are part of the Cotswold escarpment which drops steeply down into the Severn Valley. We are on the very edge of Stow, overlooking our own field and down towards the village of Longborough. It is a pleasant landscape, however the aspect that moves me most just now is not the land, but the sky.

The orientation of the house is such that when I sit in my usual armchair in the lounge I can, with the slightest movement of my head, glance from the TV screen to a broad section of the sky centered on the setting sun, and most evenings the latter is by far the most interesting. Those sunsets are so varied, so spectacular, so colourful, so expansive, so inspiring, so moving that I fear that I do not have the vocabulary to adequately describe them. Anyway, what would be the point of a word picture depicting a natural phenomenon that everyone experiences hopefully many times in their lives? I could take a photograph of an especially exceptional sunset of course, and I have, but the equipment I possess never quite captures my own experience, and I guess that everyone’s experience of sundown is subtly different anyway.

During the Covid lockdown I saw many spectacular sunsets and, perhaps as a result, this reawakened a dormant interest in what follows: the sky at night. I think that my reawakening was also stimulated by the Elon Musk’s Spacex rocket used to carry two men up to the International Space Station (ISS). Interesting to see that space travel is now a commercial, rather than government funded, venture and intriguing to see the ISS pass through the night sky with those two men aboard.

We knew roughly where to look from a website so we stood in our field watching the sky to the south on the night after the launch. Margaret spotted it first: it was very bright and moved through the heavens quickly, leaving no doubt about what it was. It was rather humbling to think that there were people up there. This event then seemed to lead naturally to spotting the planet Mercury which appeared just after dusk and quickly passed beneath the northern horizon. Though just a pinprick of light it was exciting to watch the Sun’s nearest planet move through the sky.

I found Mercury with the help of a mobile app and this progressed to the location of Jupiter and Saturn in the southern sky. I learned that Jupiter is at its brightest for us just now and, as the most massive of the planets, is - apart from the moon of course - one of the most luminous objects in the night sky. I have been watching it rise and fall for a couple of months now together with Saturn which seems to follow it across the southern hemisphere. Lately Mars has risen in the east and I have been able to see all three from the south facing window of this room. Together with sightings of Venus, the brightest of all, that completes the planets nearest to our Sun. The more distant ones, Uranus and Neptune, are harder to see, but I do hope to spot them soon.

As if to underline my admiration of the infinity that envelopes us, the mid-August night sky put on a special display recently. The evening was dry, hot and humid and there was little cloud cover, just a few large formations in the north-west. As darkness fell these began to glow intermittently with a soft inner light reminiscent of an incandescent tube flickering into life. This display of intra-cloud lightning endured for some hours, and to add to the eeriness of this sight there was a complete lack of sound - a sure indication that the storm was a considerable distance away and that we gardeners wouldn’t be getting any rain. I was disappointed that I did not see the expected meteor shower that night, but those luminous clouds were enough.

Then, on the very next day, we did have a thunder storm. We were walking to a pub in a nearby village  to do our bit for the Eat Out to Help Out scheme. It was warm and humid with barely a breeze as we strolled down a sun stroked lane towards Broadwell, then, very suddenly, a fierce wind ripped through the woodland at our side almost blinding us with air born debris. The sky darkened quickly and a few drops of rain fell. We still had a few miles to go towards our destination, but good beer and food beckoned so we pressed on. At one point we had to shelter in a copse as the rain belted down. When it lessened we had to cross a wide, recently harvested field feeling very exposed beneath the looming thunder clouds. Suddenly a brilliant streak of lightning forked down straight ahead of us as if creating a short-lived pointer to our destination, and this was immediately followed by a deafening crack of thunder so this time we were near the eye of the storm. I did get quite wet (Margaret had the umbrella), but it was well worth it: both to experience the angry sky and the welcoming inn.

I’m sure that most of you have seen many beautiful sunsets, witnessed impressive thunder storms, and also spotted the planets. But for all of that, I felt a strong need to share my wonder, awareness and enjoyment of the sky. It may be so terrifyingly grand as that it diminishes our individuality, but it can also expand our minds.